According to recent news by the Outlook, Odisha government has recently decided to include seven major crops – paddy, groundnut, cotton, turmeric, ginger, red-gram (arhar) and maize – under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY) for the kharif season, 2017.

This was decided at the State Level Coordination (SLC) Committee meeting on Crop Insurance held under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary A P Padhi. Last year, five types of crops – paddy, groundnut, cotton, ginger, and turmeric – were covered under the PMFBY.

PMFBY was implemented in Odisha during kharif 2016 season. A total number of 17.63 lakh farmers cultivating around 12.57 lakh hectare were brought into the insurance fold, official sources said adding that a total sum of Rs 68.88 crore was insured for the farmers.

Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), is new Crop Insurance Scheme is in line with One Nation – One Scheme theme. It incorporates the best features of all previous schemes and at the same time, all previous shortcomings/weaknesses have been removed. The PMFBY will replace the existing two schemes National Agricultural Insurance Scheme as well as the Modified NAIS.

Around Rs 530 crore was paid as premium to the insurance companies. During this season around Rs. 422 crore of claim was raised by the farmers from all 30 districts that were divided into 5 clusters for the purposes of crop insurance.

Padhi emphasized that since the crop cutting experiment was done through the application of remote sensing and mobile apps, there should be no confusion in expediting settling the claims. Odisha is a leading state in the application of remote sensing and mobile apps in crop cutting experiment.

Padhi emphasized that since the crop cutting experiment was done through the application of remote sensing and mobile apps, there should be no confusion in expediting settling the claims. Odisha is a leading state in the application of remote sensing and mobile apps in crop cutting experiment.

This was started from Kharif, 2016 with 33,000 live samples collected from various parts of the state.